In the eighteenth century, “technology” didn’t name a particular device or a process. It referred instead to written accounts of the mechanical arts, a now-obsolete category encompassing the wide range of work done by hand, from baking bread to building ships. Rewriting the Mechanic examines how these written descriptions, circulating across genres in eighteenth-century Britain, transformed certain mechanical arts by imagining them as newly innovative, authoritative, and able to make speculative possibilities real—as what we now call technological. Reversing the familiar story in which literature simply reflects technological change, West draws on the work of Robert Hooke, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen to demonstrate the influence of literary techniques on ideas about masculinity, power, and the body, and how these texts helped to bring the very idea of technological modernity into being.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

EMILY M. WEST is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

List of Illustrations

Introduction: The Literary Making of Technological Capacity

1. Mechanic Deformity and Speculative Possibility in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia

2. Spectacular Artifice in Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon

3. Material Determinisms and Misfire in Drill Manuals, Charlotte Charke/Charles Brown’s Narrative, and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda

4. Remaking Cotton in Narratives of British Industry

Coda: Silicon Valley’s Speculative Fictions

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Index